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Hi, welcome to my blog of moaning and various other things related to music or whatever the hell I feel like spieling out. Not spielberging, that's a completely different thing, I don't want to go there...

Tag Archives: Music

Glastonbury Festival 2013. The line-up today has been announced. The headliners don’t seem to have been properly confirmed, I’m going to guess it’s just the first 3 bands appearing on the bill for the main stage. These top three are: Arctic Monkeys, The Rolling Stones and Mumford & Sons. I had heard that The Rolling Stones were strongly rumoured to be headlining, and now this has been confirmed i think that you will be getting a lot of older people making the pilgrimage to Glastonbury. That night could also prove to be a very rocking night, so long as the boys remember to take their old man medication. Arctic Monkeys are another rock band on the top of the bill, they had their cover of The Beatles’ Come Together played at the olympic opening ceremony 250 years ago now. Perhaps it will make a return this night. And Mumford & Sons, I think we can say the evenings will be packed with guitars around the pyramid stage.

If you’ve seen the website for the Glastonbury Festival, you will have found that it has been severely reduced to simply one webpage. If i remembered some of the web addresses for the other pages on that site i would have tried to see if they have actually been taken down or if the links have just disappeared. Either way this drastically simplifies the website and it must be a way of keeping the website up and running. The last thing they want on announcement night is the website to crash and no one getting access to the website. I say good plan.

The poster for it for this year also looks incredibly oldschool. And thinking about it that definitely is a good thing, no one wants another rubbish arty piece of crap thats trying to be more than it is. Some ridiculous art student drop out taken up to draw up a poster. Nah, I’m glad this poster is simple. Goes back to the oldschool way of doing it. And what with Glastonbury being the longest running festival in England its a great way of advertising the event, and thats not sarcastic.

For me the line-up could have been better, but that’s just me, I thought there could have been chances for Muse to be there, or some other bands that I like, but hey oh well. Garunteed the event will still sell-out after the April ticket resale begins. It would be something that everyone should go to at some point. A lot festivals these days seem to have turned into just events where teenagers go to celebrate exam results. Which has completely put me off going so much. The only way to avoid them is to go somewhere a little more far away, remote, smaller.

Anyway, with the Glastonbury festival taking place at the very end of June it sure should be exciting for whoever is going. Shame music these days has turned to shit.

There we go, a nice catchy title to fool you all into thinking this could be an interesting bit on what clouds sound like. Well here we go, err, I don’t know what they sound like. What were you expecting? No what this is really about is Soundcloud, of course though if you recognised the logo then you already knew that. This is the website where people upload their ‘sounds’ and that seems to be about it really.

Now you may be thinking that I’m obviously writing this because Soundcloud have asked me to and so I can advertise them. I can one hundred percent ensure you, that there is no way that’s true. For one, why on earth would they come to me of all people, on a blog that gets minimal traffic, and someone who would write in the blog about how there is no way it would be conceivable that they would have asked me to do this. Wait I’ve really confused myself there, it’s like a paradox. On!

I Soundcloud tracks…what?

I joined Soundcloud not that long ago, thought, ‘hey, I like music, let’s try out something other than YouTube.’ Because the thing with YouTube, see here I am damning YouTube so they haven’t asked me to write this (let’s get over this, no one has asked me to write this, I am doing it on my own whim) …done? Yes. The thing with YouTube is that music people uploaded either has a boring video which is a bore and doesn’t compliment the music, or it is just a black screen, which doesn’t work on a video sharing site. So Soundcloud is better because it is just music, or rather ‘sounds’ as they call them, which you can have in the background. This works pretty well, makes life a bit more simple.

But I’ve found that it just seems to be just like all these other social networking sites, people trying to make others care about them. This kind of relates back to the name of this blog page thing. They only want others to listen to their own music, and it seems at any cost. Already I have had 2 people start following me and I haven’t uploaded anything! They are clearly just following me so I will get a little notification and they hope I will follow them back and listen to their music. Which also, kind of works, I listen to one song maybe and see if I like it, more often than not I will just listen to 30 seconds and think, ‘shit,’ and move on. Yeah maybe that’s being unfair, but well life’s not fair.

Annoyingly i don’t have time to upload anything there because I’m deep into exams, why you ask? Well have a look in the About section. But it’s pretty obvious anyway, probably the first thing that popped into your head. Yeah so all I’ve been doing on Soundcloud has been looking around. And it doesn’t really seem that well laid out, and when I say laid out I mean, structured. It’s difficult to straight away dive in and try to find the kind of music you want to.

It’s clearly a struggle for musicians with limited funds to get anywhere on it, using a microphone on their phone to perhaps record guitar and vocals doesn’t come off as overly professional, but could have just as much skill as someone who has used professional software and professional kit to produce, mix and master their track. I for one prefer to hear the more garagy sounds anyway, maybe I need to join some other site called http://www.soundcloudbutmoregaragydemolikestuffthatilike.co.uk or whatever.

If you are interested, and this is shameful, but a friend of mine, who records using not much at all has a profile, has a Soundcloud profile, go and add some plays to some of his tracks, I will be forever grateful. Click here. That’ll do…

The Olympics, something i quite enjoy watching on the t.v, as always the field events, gymnastics canoeing and a few other things catch my attention and i try to keep my eye on what’s going on. This year it being held in London has been somewhat exhausting and tedious. The amount of times i hear people talking about it and getting excited about it, ‘ooh I’m so excited to go to the Olympics’ a general example of something i may overhear. Just gets on my nerves. I like the Olympics and watching it, it’s just all this hype about it that I can’t stand.

Tonight though was the opening ceremony and i thought I’d quite like to see that, I had watched the Beijing opening ceremony in 2008 and seeing as this was in London and i was at a loose end I went down to the local pub with some friends and I watched it in there. Now I don’t want to be another one of these boring people writing the same old thing about the same thing everybody’s going to be blogging about at the moment. So i’ll get this part out of the way first: It was good, it was entertaining, it was pretty cool seeing all the different effects, how they lit the whole seating area, the different set pieces used, it was good. The highlight must have been Rowan Atkinson.

Right that’s that bit out of the way, now for the majority of the time we were watching this, me and my mate were basically just picking holes and criticising every part of it, mainly just for a laugh, and also it made it more interesting, and to be English and be annoyed about everyone being drones about it all. The amount of times everyone in the pub cheered and clapped was just annoying, you don’t need to do that. A country walks by, everyone cheers, I just look round in utter disbelief…why are you cheering!? The set piece involving Daniel Craig and the Queen was pretty arrogant, but i guess they are just showing off Britishness, but at one point they were using Voldemort from the Harry Potter books, that’s not Britishness, that’s just a book, and If that book gets a big inflatable figure, why doesn’t anything else? At one point I was half expecting a huge cup of tea to rise up from the ground, but alas there was no such thing. How disappointing.

Clearly I believe the Parachute jump was simply done by cutting in close ups of Daniel Craig and the Queen on the helicopter, then get stunt people dressed as them to actually do the jump, they land somewhere unseen, then just get the Queen to walk out into the stadium from behind a door where she’s been the whole time. That’s just to clear it up for any of you who actually believe the Queen did a parachute jump.

Stating that the man sitting at the desk on a computer (i forget his name) invented the internet, was kind of a bit false though. I’m pretty sure he didn’t invent it. And when i say pretty sure, i mean 100%. It was more of a thing which kind of just evolved into what it is now, he was just part of the team putting it together, i only have a very vague knowledge of this, if anyone wants to correct me, then please do. It also seemed they were crediting the whole of the Industrial age to Isambard Kingdom Brunel, which is wrong, again he was only a part of it. To me it just seemed they were putting a lot of focus on places which didn’t deserve the focus, just to make it seem more of a spectacle. Which they are allowed to have some license in seeing as it is meant to be just entertainment. Perhaps I just moan too much.

One part i was disappointed with was the music, I’m a big Britpop fan, and from what i heard, i could only hear one song from that Era, that being Song 2 by blur, youtube link here. Most of the music which came before that was pretty good i thought, good old 60’s right up to the 90’s. But after that all I heard was rubbish music, apart from maybe that Muse song ‘Uprising’ (here). Come on, now we have better music than what i heard there, I thought Britpop would be a big part, maybe some Oasis tracks, but no, not a sausage. Atleast there was a good cover of Come Together, covered by the Arctic Monkeys.

I heard on the news somewhere that it was estimated that about one billion people would be watching it (great article on this here). One Billion!? Yeah right, if my Facebook news feed is anything to go by (which it’s not, it’s an unfair sample, everyone who is on Facebook most likely has access to the opening ceremony, and the news feed is filled with statuses as there is a huge influx of status’s about the Olympics, so the status’s which aren’t Olympic based don’t get their fair percentage, so it’s quite an unfair sample) then the whole world was watching. Which is obviously an exaggeration I’m aware of. But the amount of updates I found when i got back was unbelievable! Some people even seemed to be keeping live updates coming every 2 minutes. No one cares! We are watching it ourselves most likely!

There are other parts of this that i could rant on about, but I think that’s enough for now. What I do look forward to is hearing the news tomorrow about what people have been complaining about, like which parts they believe offended other people, and other things like that. Mainly controversial issues are the fun ones to listen too, because it’s just hilarious to hear peoples wrong views….

Oasis’ (not sure if that apostrophe is right but i’m sure there’s meant to be one somewhere there) song gas panic is quite simply, on my opinion one of the hypest things they have ever put out. I can only be annoyed about how i never managed to get to see them live. More about that kind of thing in another blog maybe. You probably have no idea what that refers to but i do, and i’m the only one here so who cares! But if anyone is out there and of similar like mind to me, i would urge you to listen to ‘gas panic’ it’s just so brilliant. Do the studio version then the live version, and see what you like best, i’m undecided.

If however you are one of these musical retards (excuse my bluntness) who only cares for what is in the charts, and all this terrible hip hop, drum and bass, r and b, boring same 4 chord, unimaginative, producer made, piano vocal, talentless rubbish that has invaded the music industry, then don’t waste your time. The genius of it would be wasted on you, maybe genius is too strong a word, not genius, but it’s brilliant, but you may aswell not even bother finishing to read this post, because it will probably serve to fuel your supreme illogical unthought out arguments which you roll out like dung beetles.

And whats more i don’t even want you to continue following this, your not welcome here, so what else can i do to insult you? I can’t be bothered to waste my time thinking of it right now, but that should just be a good enough reason not to come back. Huh, many blog writers want lots of people to follow them. I seem to be just pushing away the huge majority of people. Ah well at least i’m happy. What does the world care.

So, sorry if you do actually like good music, but listen to that song, i’ll link the studio version here, and the live version here for you. There, minimum work on your part. I’m a nice guy after all….